also some food for thought; Russell is already on his last battery for the season

I've got nothing to say about Aston Martin.

And to wrap it up, the teams I haven't mentioned: Haas just keep quietly putting together solid cars. Ocon is looking real sketch, though, as much as I hate to say it. Cadillac are quite a bit slower than I was expecting but I don't reckon they'll be too fussed at this stage.

Ok this stomach ulcer really hurts so some more thoughts

Also the first third of this race was really good and the rest was very boring. Bedtime for me.

Hot take but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion for Mercedes yet

I am surprised by how competitive the Ferraris are on long run pace, honestly

awake at 04:46am dealing with a stomach ulcer to watch a race I know is extremely likely to be shit. doing it for the love of the game

cautions breed cautions or something

None of this to devalue Russell's actual performance or anything, I just hate these cars

It all feels really meaningless and empty, like the facsimile of racing I do with other people on track days where we're all actually just coasting well below the ultimate limit of our cars, just for different reasons

The single most offputting thing about these cars now that we've seen them in quali is how much this ''sacrifice corner speed for energy to deploy ont he straights'' formula fundamentally devalues the driver as a performance differentiator

Ok I also enjoy the unholy demolition job Mercedes put on the grid but I'm trying to be neutral here

At least these cars are really funny in that Christian Horner was completely, 100% right about them.

The thing that put me off the most in quali by *far* is watching cars put in purple S1/green s2 and stuff like that just to end up a mile off pole. The energy management has totally killed the tension of quali

i really don't like any part of these cars other than that they're smaller, this was not an enjoyable watch

bedtime

also hot take, if we're talking about looks: a lot of this year's grid is very ugly in terms of car shape i only really like the ferrari and mercedes in that regard, everything else is just proportioned weirdly

these cars look weird on track and not in a good way

I'd hate for Herta to bomb in F2 simply because it'll give miserable F1 fans ammo to punch down at Indycar

bad week

i think i did a really nice job with the base white coat on this regent, and white coats can be kind of a bitch

friendly reminder 2014 is 12 years ago

painted a guy while watching fp1 #battletech

I just don't believe Newey's claim that a car that failed to make any of the serious braking points at Bahrain would be front of the midfield if the car wasn't shit

Aston Martin publicly punching down at Honda and talking up their chassis in media briefings. Now where have I heard that before.

youtube music is recommending morrissey to me and i feel incredibly offended

i dislike dumbing down a very complex situation too much but it really does have shades of 2015 mchonda. yes, Honda did a pretty shit job of it, but let's not pretend the Adrian Newey Racing AMR26 wasn't struggling to make turns 1 and 4 basically every time it encountered them in testing

distinctly feel as if Aston Martin might regret letting Honda act as a lightning rod for all their issues when they were also late on car build and the chassis looks poor even when it's not breaking down

really incredible how I get like, more requests for pictures in a day wearing miss hina than i get in a year wearing AK stuff anyway, miss hina day

disclaimer: i type this wearing a mercedes shirt, i would really like them to be winners this season, but i also hate bullshit

kinda feels like the collective F1 media world is convincing itself mercedes is the fastest team because they ''haven't shown their hand'', which feels a little strange to me

www.bbc.com/sport/formul... a month or so ago around this time the media was losing its shit spinning adrian newey propaganda. life comes at you fast

Only one of Honda's F1 and MotoGP divisions can ever be good at any given moment

Aston Martin's pre-season is over. Lol, lmao even

alerta alerta the green shitbox (designed by adrian newey) is on track

NO JOLYON NO! DON'T CALL STRAIGHTLINE MODE ''SM''!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

fwiw F1 is riding so high right now that I don't think it matters how shit and convoluted the regulations are, it'll attract an audience anyway, this is just the sort of thing that will hurt *far* more once the lean years come

Russell isn't just a Mercedes F1 driver, he's a GPDA director and *if* what The Race claimed is true he's contradicting a union he's supposed to represent, and that feels bad

this brings up another thing: I'm usually a huge fan of George Russell and his willingness to play F1's heel but if it's true what The Race claimed, that most drivers do not like these cars but hide behind Hamilton, Alonso and Verstappen because they have actual clout, I'm very disappointed >

big fan of ben anderson, one of the race's writers, publishing an article saying the quiet part out loud: the F1 2026 regulations are a frankenstein's monster of bad compromises built around deficient engines conceived solely because the sport is immensely horny for Audi and Honda

holy fuck that bathurst 12h crash just now

I love hating and I especially love hating Aston Martin. I'm feeling like the Team Cheaters guy did at last year's 500 right now.

fairly convinced there is no fanbase that's less funny than f1

Aston Martin have a gigantic sidepod cooling vent and there's a lot of folks on r/f1 trying to convince themselves its some genius aero solution lol

Andy Cowell leaving AMR. How long was he even there? This team is such a shitshow.

this is hideous

McLaren livery. Bad. Every single one of the black-with-some-orange liveries has been bad, but the Allwyn airbox and pattern on the sidepods really makes this one the worst of that particular lot.

Quite like the Cadillac F1 livery. The asymmetry really saves it. It's neat. Not an alltimer, but it's not boring.

also the FIA is openly soliciting potential changes to the tests from the PUAC at this point, I don't think it's a question of ''if'' anymore but rather ''when and how''